Rhonda Bracey: At Random

What’s more American than a muscle car and a malt shop?

On the family farm,  which my cousin now owns,  is this great secluded pond that he had dug out of a swale in among the corn fields. It’s very private and unless you were in a plane going overhead,  or had been invited to a bonfire/BBQ or summer party there, you’d have no idea it existed.  There’s a diving board,  a dock,  a fire pit,  even a sandy beach,  and I believe there are bass and possibly turtles living in the pond,  which in parts is 30 feet deep. Because it hasn’t been used much recently (summer is long gone),  the sand is peppered with deer tracks.

As it was such a nice day,  my aunt and I took the ‘jitney’ through the corn fields to the pond and I took some pictures (no surprises there  😉 ).

The light late yesterday in rural Michigan where I’m staying was just stunning. And overnight there was frost everywhere,  all glistening in the early morning sunlight. Perfect for taking photos 😉

I’ll try to forget about locking myself out of the house for an hour until everyone else got up. Yes, it was cold!! Like only 34F when I came inside an hour later…

Here are some of the photos I took.

We don’t get autumn/fall colours in much of Australia,  though I did experience the wonder of their brilliance when I lived in Ontario,  Canada many years ago. I’d forgotten how stunning they were.

Yesterday I drove from Grand Rapids,  Michigan east on I-96, exiting at Lowell,  then driving east along M-21 towards St John’s. The trees along that route were in full colour and were just magnificent. The corn was ready to harvest, and there were pumpkin stands too, as well as quite a bit of decoration on houses and in yards for Halloween.

Here are a few of the photos I took.

Why yes, 22 packets of Tim Tams do take up nearly a quarter of my suitcase space! Fortunately, I’ll be giving them away during my trip, but I still have to get them into my luggage and get them to the US. For future reference, one large Ecosusi packing cube holds 22 full packs (16 arranged sideways, with another six laying flat across the top). But even in the packing cube, they still take up quite a bit of space.

On the bright side, that means more room for purchases I might make in the US as I’ll eventually free up that space 😉

I lashed out and purchased a down vest for my upcoming visit to the US. As Australia is coming into summer, many stores have winter stock on sale, and I picked up this little beauty for $70 (was $170!). The store clerk said it would definitely fit into its little pouch, and so it did! Amazing.

This is a very convoluted process, but it saved me a bundle of money!

I usually book my US car rental via an aggregation website like http://www.priceline.com and that was the case for my car reservation for later this year. Back in April, I got a good deal with Budget using Priceline’s bidding process, and was offered full insurance cover for $11/day for the booking, which I was happy to take based on previous experiences.

Unfortunately, after lots of attempts to buy this insurance via Priceline’s website, phone calls (via Skype, thank goodness) to Priceline in the US, to my bank, and eventually to the car insurance brokers in the US, I found out from the brokers that the reason my insurance request likely wouldn’t go through was because I was using an Australian credit card and address, despite Priceline having ‘Australia’ as one of the drop-down locations for this insurance. (I’ve bought car insurance from Priceline before, but they must’ve tightened up some of their processes as I couldn’t get it this time. It’s a pity their website doesn’t tell you why you’ve been rejected, and it’s a pity they haven’t told their customer service reps too, as I would have avoided lots of time on the phone to the US! The Priceline customer rep even told me it was my bank’s problem, so I called them just to make sure, but the bank couldn’t even see the attempted transactions let alone see if/why they had been rejected, so the transaction was being rejected at the US end.)

I could’ve purchased insurance at the counter on collecting the car, but a quick look at the Budget website in the US for that location showed that I’d be paying more than US$40/day EXTRA to have insurance coverage if I purchased it at the counter — that would be an extra US$320+ on top of a US$250 rental!!

So off to the internet of all things, looking for an insurance service that offered rental car insurance for US car rentals by Australians. I found some interesting discussions on the Australian tech forum site, Whirlpool (I find lots of [mostly] good stuff on Whirlpool!), some of which referred me to two rental agencies that included insurance with the car rental (www.rentalcars.com, which includes Collision Damage Waiver [CDW or LDW] only, and http://www.arguscarhire.com, which includes 3rd party liability protection, CDW and others, for a similar overall price for that charged by Priceline just for the car). I may well use these some other time, but the Whirlpool post that caught my eye was for Budget (who I’d already booked with via Priceline), The person who posted said that if Australians purchase via the UK Budget website (www.budget.co.uk), you get the car rental at a good price AND the price includes insurances. I checked the UK website and the price was very similar to Priceline’s but WITH all the insurances included.

Before booking via the UK site, I thought I’d better check the Australian Budget site; however, as soon as I said the rental was for the US, the Australian site took me straight to the Budget US website, where the price was almost double the Priceline and Budget UK price, although because I said I was Australian, that price did include LDW.

So I called Budget in the UK to see if I (an Australian) could book a US car rental via their UK site. I got straight through to a customer service rep (Tom) who said I sure could and he could do the booking for me right then! Tom also confirmed that the rental included CDW/LDW and liability protection with no excess. Within 5 minutes, I was all booked and it cost me less than my Priceline booking with no insurance included. I don’t have to pay until I get to the counter, just like with Priceline. After getting my confirmation, I cancelled my reservation via Priceline, a simple and painless process.

Bottom line: It pays to look for alternatives! Here’s what I found (8-day period, same pick-up/drop-off location and times/dates, same car category [mid-size]):

• Priceline bid price in April 2014: US$250 (AU$266 at today’s rates) with no insurance (insurance via Priceline — if you can get it — is an extra US$11/day)
• Australian Budget website redirected to the US site (checking the option for Australian citizen): US$494 (AU$525) (includes LDW insurance only)
• UK Budget website: GBP144 (AU$254 at today’s rates), which includes LDW and liability insurances and no excess
• US Budget website (saying I’m a US citizen): US$352 (AU$374) for no insurances; US$764 (AU$813) if I add liability and LDW insurances!

After several months of no rain (unusual for winter in California), the heavens have opened. It rained in much of California most of Wednesday and Friday this week just gone, all night Friday night and much of Saturday. As another storm front was coming in I changed my plans and decided to leave Monterey today (Saturday) instead of Sunday. And I’m glad I did.

Storm clouds inland from Monterey on Hwy 101

It took me just under 4 hours to drive from Monterey to Bakersfield, which is perhaps half way to Palm Springs, my ultimate destination tomorrow. Had I left it to Sunday I’d be driving 7 to 8 hours in possibly horrible conditions.

As it was, driving today wasn’t exactly a piece of cake. There were strong winds, heavy rain in patches, steady rain the rest of the time, some minor rock falls on the shoulders (though if you’d hit one of those small rocks with your car tires, you’d know all about it), and reasonably steady and moderate density traffic. Lots of trucks on Hwy 46, and very bad surface for some of that highway too.

Some more observations on this drive:

• Many of the groves of nut trees (almonds? pecans?) were covered in white/pale pink flowers, which looked like light snow on the ground.
• At the ends of some rows of nut trees are bee hives. I’m not sure if they are there to fertilize the trees or to collect pollen and make honey from the flowers of these trees, but it looked like a win-win for the orchardists and the apiarists.
• Tumbling tumbleweeds have almost become fences in their own right when they’ve got caught in the fences on the side of Hwy 46.
  
• Lost Hills isn’t a town so much as a paddock full of oil wells (donkeys; see the photo at the end of this post). There are hundreds in a very small area of land. There are quite a few by the Alvarado River, north of Paso Robles too.
• Close to Bakersfield there are oil donkeys in the middle of fields of crops,  which seemed a bit odd.
• Bakersfield looks pretty dry and dusty and very much a workers’ town, at least the bit I saw coming in from the I5 on Hwy 58.